He is no longer Birdie Africa. He has not been since the day his father showed up at his hospital bed to take him home—a home that no longer meant eating raw meat, sleeping in the winter air to the sound of loudspeakers, living in a world of violence, confrontation, and death. He is Michael Moses Ward, and for nearly twenty years he has lived a quiet and mostly unremarkable life. He is a compact man, his hair cropped close. Yet as he begins to tell his story, there is much about him that is still familiar. The shy smile. The soft voice. The scars.
It is 2007, and we are interviewing him for a documentary. Since the fire, he has spoken little about his life in MOVE. Now he is ready to tell his story—or, rather, the story of the boy he used to be: Birdie Africa.
His earliest memories are of MOVE.
His mother Rhonda joined when he was no more than two years old. Birdie can be seen briefly in an early documentary about MOVE: Barely out of infancy, he is in a yard with other MOVE children, naked and in dreadlocks, chanting slogans and doing calisthenics.
He still remembers the house on Powelton Avenue: the barren walls and floors, the open windows covered with wooden slats, the muddy yard, the rats, the dogs.
None of it seemed strange at the time, of course. It was his life.
When he was about three years old, he remembers, the children—himself, Phil, Tomaso, Melissa, Tree, Netta, and David—were sent to MOVE’s house in Richmond, Va., under the care of two adults: Sharon and Valerie. Like the Powelton house, it had no furniture and everyone slept on blankets on the floor. Birdie’s life continued more or less as it had been. His mother, Rhonda, joined them a few months later, but the reunion didn’t last long. She was arrested and soon afterward, Birdie and the other children went to a foster home.
He was still with Tree and Melissa, but everything else about his life was suddenly different. They were living with other foster kids, all of them sleeping in bunk beds. At mealtimes, the food was cooked. Perhaps for the first time, he began to understand what it meant to be different.
He was “interested” in what the other kids did, he says, but he wasn’t jealous or envious. He and the other MOVE kids stuck to their ways. They refused to eat the cooked food. They didn’t play with the toys. And they were too young to go to school. Mostly, he says, he just wanted to go home. When Sharon and Valerie won back custody of the kids a few months later, he was happy to return to the life he’d known.
And then they were all back in Philadelphia. It was not long after the Powelton confrontation, and many of the adults had been arrested. Those who were still free had begun to converge at LaVerne Sims’s row house in north Philadelphia. LaVerne—one of Vincent’s two sisters—has described herself as a MOVE supporter but not a member, and she lived a conventional lifestyle. Despite MOVE’s presence, Birdie found himself once again living in a house with beds and furniture.
The organization had been deeply scarred by the Powelton confrontation. If such a thing was possible, it was even more strident, more apocalyptic, more uncompromising. Its headquarters had been razed; its leaders—including Vincent—imprisoned.
By now, Birdie was reaching an age where he could begin to make sense of the doings of the adults. He remembers the day Vincent arrived at the house after his acquittal. The adults threw a party for the occasion, he recalls. MOVE supporters gathered outside the house. The kids were kept separate; they weren’t allowed to interact with the adults. He remembers being outside, playing, when the man called John Africa showed up. It was the first time Birdie met him.
Birdie had heard of John Africa, of course. But there was another figure who was even more legendary in the eyes of the kids: “Delbert Africa is really the one everybody talked about. He was my hero. The way he fought with the cops, how they beat him up and everything like that—to me was just like a big hero. They always showed us his pictures in the paper and things that happened.
“Back then I thought he was actually our leader, not John Africa. He was this mythical figure. You know, as kids, when you play this person or that person? We’d always fight over who played Delbert Africa.”
Birdie did remember Delbert from his days in Powelton. Frank and Delbert had been close, and Birdie believed that Frank—who was married to Rhonda—was his father. He saw Frank and Delbert as the true leaders of the group. They were “the ones up front—against the cops and everything.”
A few weeks after Vincent’s triumphant return, the group was on the move again—this time to Vincent’s sister Louise’s house on Osage Avenue. By then, his following had been considerably diminished. Jerry Ford Africa and Don Glassey had also been freed. But most of the core group of MOVE members were in jail. As some of them were released one by one in the years that followed, many came to live in the house on Osage. Birdie was reunited with his mother and Frank. He remembers happy times: “Back then, John Africa was all right. He would make toys out of wood for us and things like that. We would go to the park all the time and swim. We had animals, dogs. So it was basically a big type of family.”
It was no longer a family that lived in isolation, cut off from the world by barricades. The kids could see the other children on the block going to school, playing games, living a different life. But now the MOVE kids felt something more than mild curiosity about how the others lived. They began to see what they didn’t have. And they wanted it.
“We would try to sneak out to play with the other kids,” he recalls. The other kids in the neighborhood would tell them stories they’d heard about MOVE -– that they were dirty, that they ate animals. But before long all of them were playing together and the differences were ignored. Among the MOVE kids and neighborhood children, “everyone was treated the same,” he says.
The more Birdie and the other MOVE kids interacted with the outside world, the more they were drawn to it. “That’s when we started hearing music and things like that,” he recalls. “We’d play in the alleyways with other kids. Or sneak around down to the end [of the street]. They would give us little cars or candy and things, because we never had that stuff.”
And the more the kids saw of this larger world, the less they liked their own: “The older us kids got, we didn’t want to be in MOVE. As you grow older, I guess, you see other kids having fun, the way they’re living, and you start to realize it’s not normal, you know? It just wasn’t fun anymore. I was starting to realize things, and I just didn’t like it. I didn’t like him [John Africa] either.”
The kids longed to be like their friends in the neighborhood. They wanted to play with toys. They wanted to go to school. The kids took the toys the neighborhood children had given them and hid them around the house. Outside the house, they’d put on backpacks and pretend they were going to school. “We wanted, like, a normal life.”
Nor could the kids ignore MOVE’s growing conflict with the city and the neighbors. John Africa became less and less visible, mostly staying out of sight in an upstairs room. The adults held their meetings in his room. Some kids would be invited in, but not Birdie. After a while, all the kids were banned from the room.
About a year before the 1985 confrontation, Birdie and the other kids decided to run away.
At the time, they were living in another MOVE house in Philadelphia. Tree had found a pair of scissors. The kids cut each other’s hair and slipped out of the house. They got perhaps a half a block away before the adults caught them.
The kids were marched back to the Osage house. The adults held a meeting, threatening the kids with punishment. At some point the adults were all called upstairs into John Africa’s room, and later emerged with him to continue the meeting. During the meeting, Frank punched Birdie in the jaw, knocking him unconscious.
The escape attempt marked a turning point in the kids’ relationship with the adults. Outside the house, the adults started keeping a closer eye on them. They were taken to Cobbs Creek Park, but were no longer allowed to play with the other kids in the neighborhood. They saw little of John Africa after that, as he remained locked in his room. But his presence was felt.
For Birdie, one punishment was even more painful than the beating he’d received from Frank. John Africa had told his mother not to speak to Birdie or have anything to do with him. “I was real attached to my Mom, but every time I did something they perceived was wrong, I wasn’t allowed to talk to her or be around her.” From then until the confrontation Birdie and his mother saw little of each other.
After that, he says, “things just started getting weird, I guess. I don’t know. Downhill from there . . . after a while, me and my mom wasn’t that close. But I was really close with Rad. And Rad died. [Conrad Africa died in the confrontation on May 13.] So I guess that’s kind of what made me who I am today. I don’t really get attached to people.”
Birdie and the other kids knew all about the Powelton confrontation, of course; some of them had lived through it. They understood that confrontation between MOVE and the “lifestyle”—and in particular, the Philadelphia Police Department—was an everyday part of their life, and that it would no doubt erupt in violence again.
When the grownups started boarding up the house, Birdie knew a confrontation was imminent. Other incidents also pointed to the coming conflict: “We had a house in Chester. We used to go back and forth with Alonso, and the cops would stop and beat him up a couple of times. The cops were following us around and things started going down from there. . . . The kids knew something was going to happen but it wasn’t like we were scared or anything. It was kind of exciting at first.”
As the months wore on, he says, Don Glassey was at the house a lot, meeting with the others. “That’s when they started building the bunkers. That’s when we started being on the roof a lot instead of in the house—summer and wintertime. It was cold. [I had a] blanket and us kids we all slept together, huddled up together.” They would stack up wooden pallets and stretch blankets across to make a sort of tent. Sometimes Frank or Rad would sleep on the roof with them; other times the kids slept by themselves.
Meanwhile, MOVE was preparing the house for an assault. They began reinforcing the glassed-in sun porch: “We built a bunker [inside the porch] with railroad ties. We used to find metal and nail metal to it . . . and for the see-out it was thick glass.” They also fortified the upstairs windows with more railroad ties. And work began on two bunkers on the roof.
The night before the confrontation, the adults tried to prepare the kids for what was coming. They held a meeting, showing newspaper stories of the Powelton confrontation and the assault on Delbert. Some of the kids, in turn, reported that they’d been seeing things in the night—“like demons. So they had a meeting on that—people seeing demons.” That night, the kids and adults went to sleep together upstairs. Despite the commotion and worry, Birdie slept soundly.
Early the next morning, he woke up hearing Sambor’s voice on a loudspeaker, demanding MOVE’s surrender. The adults roused the kids and hurried them into the basement. As they went, they could hear the water blasting into the house.
In the basement, he remembers seeing the street-level windows blown out and water pouring in, flooding the floor. Tear gas was filling the air. A row of buckets had been lined up; each was filled with water and had a blanket soaking in it. The kids were told to wrap the wet blankets around their heads to protect themselves from the tear gas.
The basement was in the front of the house. In the rear was the garage, at the same level but separated by a concrete firewall. A hatch had been cut into the firewall. Once the kids had their blankets, they and several of the adults climbed through the hatch into the garage.
The interior of the garage was dry and cool, fortified with more railroad ties. On the end of the garage facing the alley, the garage door had been replaced by more fortifications. In it was a hinged trap door—about waist high and two feet on a side—that was closed and bolted shut from the inside.
Once they’d climbed through to the garage and closed the basement hatch behind them, the garage was pitch black. They arranged themselves along the front wall of the garage—away from where the garage door would be—and waited, their heads wrapped in dripping blankets. Through the walls, they could hear explosions and gunfire. From time to time, the hatch to the basement opened as grownups came and went.
From this point on, Michael’s recollections are highly detailed, yet confusing and incomplete. Hiding in the garage, in the dark, as the day wore on, it was difficult to know how much time passed and what precisely was going on in the rest of the house. It is, perhaps, best to let Michael tell the story from here in his own words, in the transcript of our interview with him, which we’ve edited slightly for clarity:
After a while you hear a big thing and the whole house shook. Then after a while you could hear the wood burning and smoke coming through. So it just started going downhill from there . . .
So after the big explosion, then everybody came into the garage at that point?
I can’t say everybody made it, but those who did were in the garage.
So who was in the garage at that point that you know of?
My mother Rhonda, Teresa, Ramona. I thought Rad was still in there. Raymond, Phil, Tomaso, Melissa and—what’s her name, well, we called her Netta.
How about Frank?
I don’t think he was in there, at that time.
How about John Africa?
I don’t think he was in there at that time either.
Did anybody say where they were or what—
No.
So this group sort of gathers in the—
Well, basically we was trying before that—we were trying to get out of the garage and that’s when the gunfire was still going on and off and I remember basically Rad was trying to get the kids out. That’s when everybody was yelling, “We’re coming out, we’re coming out.” They were trying to get us kids out of there and the police wouldn’t let us get out.
So that was before the bomb was dropped?
Right. Before the bomb was dropped, you heard the police guns firing at the garage and throughout the house and you heard a lot of little bangs going on around the house, and after a while people started—the police were telling to let the kids out, I don’t know—the adults started yelling, “The kids are coming out, the kids are coming out.” So we kept trying to get through that little trap door and every time there was gunfire around so we couldn’t get out. And they tried about three times, I’m not sure, to let us out.
Did you go outside at that point?
No, they wouldn’t let us. Rad, the first time, Rad has Tomaso and he was trying to get out ‘cause he was there facilitating the kids to come out—him, Ramona and my mother were trying to get us kids out of there and every time they did that, the gunfire would start up and everything. And that’s when they had it open a little bit, yelling, “The kids are coming out, we’re coming out.” And they wouldn’t let us out.
So they re-latched the thing up and then after that, maybe like an hour or so after that, that’s when you hear the big bang and we were still in there. . . . We didn’t try to get out then because we didn’t know what was going on.
Then all of a sudden, the garage started filling up with smoke and you can hear it getting real hot and steamy in there and I guess everything was burning down around us so you could hear it crackling.
But then, I believe it was Rad and Ramona, they unlatched the thing and Ramona went outside first. I believe it was Ramona. I don’t know if Rad was there at that time. I don’t know what happened to him because I haven’t . . . I stopped hearing his voice.
But I remember Ramona went out first and they started trying to get the kids out. I just remember everyone crawling over each other. I don’t even know how I got out of there. It’s just like a black, a blank. I was out of there. I know my mom was pushing me and Phil out of there. So we got through there—me, Phil and Tree. That’s what I remember. [I] was through there and my mom got out, I believe she got out. She had Tomaso at that time, I believe.
As we were running, you just saw everything burning down. The tree was burning down, falling on us. But we had a thing we built for cats so they could walk up the alleyway, and we could climb on it too. Ramona went up there first. Then it was Tree and Phil like followed them and she helped them up.
Then I tried to go up there [on the catwalk] and it broke on me and I fell back down. So I turned around and ran down the big alleyway and I got down there pretty much halfway and I hear Ramona telling me to come up, come up, so I went to climb up there and she tried to help me—she put out her hand and I grabbed it and she was trying to pull me up. And that’s when I fell and I hit the ground.
I guess I fainted or whatever, blacked out, I don’t know. Then when I woke up, I remember, there was like a puddle, the bottom of the thing was flooded and I heard . . . well, when I woke up I was like in water, half of my body was in water. And I got up and I went to run back up towards the fire, ‘cause I was trying to go with my mom. . . .
Then I heard—these two policemen could see me and I heard them yelling, “Come here, get over here, get over here.” And I ran back the other way—that’s when they had their guns drawn out and they were like, “Get over here, get over here.”
So I hesitated, but then I ran over to them. One grabbed me there and they picked me up under my shoulders and ran me to a van. So I was sitting in the van and you could see the smoke and fire and lights and whatnot. You could tell it was a big fire. I was screaming, “I want my mom. I want my mom.” and things like that.
Then after a while, I believe, they took me to a hospital. Some of that is foggy, I don’t really remember that, once I was in the hospital. They gave me water, then they shot me up, like, gave me medications, and I don’t remember pretty much after that.
As we listened to Michael tell his story, we realized that this was something new—because he was placing the first escape attempt before the bomb was dropped. In all of the years and all of the investigations since 1985, the debate, questions, and discussion about the events in the back alley had focused on what had happened after the bomb had been dropped and the house caught on fire.
But was it possible that everyone—the MOVE commission, the grand jury, and ourselves—had been asking the wrong questions all along?
What if the first escape attempt had happened much earlier—during the protracted gun battle earlier in the day? What if, in the midst of that battle, someone saw movement at the hatch in the garage and assumed it was a threat? What if they’d mistaken Conrad—perhaps holding a monkey wrench as he started to make his way out of the hatch—as a sniper and opened fire? And what if that was the gunfire that made the people in the garage afraid to try another escape—until the very end, when it was too late?
Michael’s account is compelling. But it is not entirely consistent with other evidence—including the deposition he himself gave to the MOVE Commission in 1985. In that deposition, he said that the police gunfire happened during the final escape attempt in the evening—after the bomb had been dropped and minutes before his mother pushed him through the hatch:
[Michael:] That’s when the big bomb went off
[Nods.] It shook the whole house up . . .
. . . and then they told us to go out, and we said we ain’t want to go out, we wanted to be with them. And then they said . . . we’ll see you, and then we was going out and Rad was taking Tomaso out. Then the cops started shooting again. Then they locked the thing up and waited for a while and then the fire got real—all that smoke started coming in and you could hear the stuff dropping upstairs. And then that’s when they started hollering things and said, “Kids coming out” and stuff.
Where did Mona go?
Mona, she was putting Phil and Tree up in the alley.
She was putting Phil and Tree in the alley?
Yeah, and then she told them to keep running. And then she tried to get me, and I . . . I didn’t make it. And then I fell, and then I was running again, and I tried to climb up the wall part, and that’s when I fell . . .
It is tempting to believe Michael’s later account. The details are compelling and he has no reason to lie. He is not a defender of MOVE. And it offers a way to reconcile many of the conflicting accounts of the events of the back alley.
But it all depends on the timing, and timing has always been one of the most problematic parts of this entire story. Cops who were involved in the assaults on the house said that minutes seemed like hours. Mayor Goode’s timeline for his actions after the bomb was dropped was confused and ultimately proven to be incorrect. And Michael was hiding in a pitch-black basement, cut off from the world, with nothing to mark the passage of time—no watch, no meals, no news reports. Was the timeline as clear as he remembered it?
Later in the interview, we returned to these events and asked him to recall them again:
There was gunfire outside [he says]. See, y’all are saying there was a big pause, during the fire, when we in the basement. I don’t remember that. I don’t remember no big pauses.
Well, but Mike, was there a big pause between the gunfight early on and later in the day—before the bombing?
Yeah, there was. Right before the bombing, there was a pause in that.
So there was kind of a lull between when you tried to get out the first time and when the bomb was dropped?
No. During the day, in the morning, is when everything broke out. There was gunfire but I don’t believe we tried to get out then. There was a lull in it, but around . . . I guess the police were still dropping bombs in the front, because I remember one time Rad came out and told my mom, “They got some mean bombs.” . . . You would hear little bangs here and there but it wasn’t . . . during the back it wasn’t that much gunfire. Most of the activity was up front.
Then there was like a lull, like it was kind of quiet outside and nothing was going on . . . But I believe at that time, I think the police were telling to let the kids out. I’m not that sure. I believe that happened for like a couple of hours into the afternoon or evening, and that’s when the gunfire started happening again, and that’s when we were yelling [that] we were trying to come out . . .
And since all this happened before the fire, the gunfire you heard the first time you tried to get out, it couldn’t have been—
It was coming from the back—
It was coming from the back, and it couldn’t have been exploding glass—
No—
—or transformers because there was no fire—
Right . . . It was like quiet or whatever and then I remember Rad opening the thing up and then they told us to yell, “The kids are coming out. We’re coming out.” And as soon as he opened the thing you heard like a pow. They started shooting and that lasted for a while. So he closed it again and we tried it two more times and you would hear gunfire again. So then they just gave up on that.
Here again, the timing becomes problematic. Michael’s recollections seem to put this first attempt before the bomb fell but after the morning gun battle. Yet there’s no evidence of gunfire after the morning operations. If three separate incidents of shooting had occurred, in close succession, in the middle of the lull, it almost certainly would have been reported and remembered.
Which leaves the most likely time to be, perhaps, sometime toward the end of the morning gun battle—perhaps around noon, as members of Insertion Team A huddled in the alley, having blown out the floor joists of 6223, just west of the MOVE house. That’s when a radio reported a sniper with a rifle, and when Frank Powell heard the voices of women and children coming through a drainpipe. Perhaps what he heard, but did not understand, were cries for help.
Ramona Africa, the only other survivor of the fire, declined our request for an interview. But she has provided an account of the escape as well in a lengthy YouTube interview. It is worth hearing what she said in her own words:
Now we’re all in the basement, and you know, there was a lull between the shooting and the time they dropped the bomb. We didn’t know what was going on, we were just maintaining our position. And they dropped the bomb, and we didn’t know specifically that it was a bomb. We heard like the explosion and the house, like, shook—but, you know—I mean it didn’t occur to us that they had dropped a bomb.
But pretty quickly—it didn’t take long—it got smokier and smokier in the basement. And at first we thought it was the tear gas but as it got thicker, it was becoming clear that this was something else happening here, this wasn’t just tear gas.
And it started getting hot in there, you know, it started getting really hot. And then we could hear like crackling, and we looked and we could see the trees outside of our home on fire. So we knew that the house was on fire at that point. And we immediately, immediately tried to get our children, our animals, ourselves out of that burning building. You know, we were hollering that we were coming out, the kids were hollering that they were coming out but the instant that we could be seen coming from you know, the house—the instant we could be seen by cops, they immediately started shooting, trying to prevent anybody from, you know, coming out of that house. We were forced back in at least twice that I clearly, you know, recollect, at least twice.
Then, you know, like the third time, I believe it was, it’s like you’re in a position where you’re either going to choke to death and burn alive, or you could, you know, possibly been shot to death. So, we tried, you know, to get out again. And at that point I was successful and I was able to get a little boy, Birdie, out. We are the only two survivors. Everybody else was right behind us, but, you know, apparently didn’t make it out. Or made it out and were shot and somehow got back into the building. . . .1
This account adds to our perplexity: Ramona puts the shooting incident after the bombing and right before the final escape attempt, consistent with Michael’s 1985 deposition. Her account differs from our interview with Michael not only in the timing of the first escape but in a few other particulars. She remembers getting Birdie out of the building; Michael says it was his mother. She says that she got out first, then Birdie, followed by Phil and Tree behind him. Michael remembers the two other children ahead of him on the catwalk; they reach (or nearly reach) the elevated sidewalk where Ramona was standing.
So what actually happened?
When we wrote the book, we were confident that there was no evidence of police gunfire in the back alley that prevented the kids and others from escaping. There were too many witnesses and too much evidence to cover it up.
Taking Michael’s recollections into account, we find ourselves less confident, though still not convinced that there was shooting. If the incident happens the way Michael remembers, surely there would be evidence—if not witnesses, then radio transcripts or journalists reporting the eruption of gunfire in the midst of an afternoon lull. And given the opportunity to accuse the police of shooting during that final escape, Michael declined to do so.
Like so many of the stories that make up the larger story of the MOVE confrontation, this one ends with a question mark.